


Canceling the Apocalypse

by rainbowagnes



Category: Pacific Rim (2013), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Based On Pacific Rim, Chirrut and Baze are Jaeger pilots, F/M, Gen, I don't know much about Pacific Rim, I'll try and fix, Jyn is a car thief, M/M, So are Ahsoka and Cassian, So just leave all the mistakes in comments, The ahsoka mentoring Cassian relationship that's totally non canon but makes me cry anyway, but also some fluff, team fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-09-18 21:51:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9404510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/pseuds/rainbowagnes
Summary: Bodhi Rook wants to make a difference. Chirrut Imwe and Baze Malbus want to save the world. Cassian Andor wants to do his mentor proud. Jyn Erso just wants out of prison.The Pacific Rim is counting on them.





	1. Chapter 1

Eighteen Years Ago

Saw Gerrera cuts an unusual figure against the smoggy London night.  


He walks purposefully down a street that was once probably a neat middle-class suburb. The swelling population of London, exacerbated by the floods of people leaving the Pacific Rim after the ongoing Kaiju attacks and international militarization, have forced the rapid development of ugly apartment blocks. They fit at odd, sloping angles, the reminder of a war on the other side of the world. 

A war that Saw has been fighting since it began. 

He stops in front of a low brick manor that looks like, once upon a time, it might have been the home of one of one of the endless royals Britain used to churn out. Now it's crumbling and fading, the gardens paved over and carriages replaced with a rusting school bus. 

"Saint Felicity's Home For The Abandoned," the sign says. 

If there's anyone who's abandoned, it's this girl. No known family, no friends, no relatives to claim her. She performed stunningly well on the battery of tests the UN forces on all the public schools now, her scores indicating an ideal candidate for the Jaeger program. "She can join your pool," Mon Mothma had told him when she emailed him the news. "Train her. See if she becomes something extraordinary." 

Saw had almost rolled his eyes. "Let's see if she can survive the Drift, first." 

But he'd come anyway. A jaeger pilot has billions of dollars, millions of lives resting on their abilities. Saw wasn't about to pass on the possibility of another potential pilot, but he always interviewed the candidates first. 

He checks his tablet. Jyn Erso, it says her name is. She's small, mousy brown hair, skin paper white. Eight years old, and already she's scored impossibly well on the strategy and logic sections of the exam. She doesn't look like much, but then, of course, the best pilots never do. Look at Tano.

His metal leg drags on the gravel as he walks up to the front door and knocks. A tiny child wearing an oversized t-shirt opens the door. 

"Are you an inspector?" 

"No. I'm a recruiter. For the Jaeger program" 

The kid's about to close the door again when a woman shows up. Young, haried, bottle red hair falling in her face. The caretaker of the orphanage. 

"I'm here to see about Jyn Erso." 

She shakes her head and ushers him in. "Yes, yes of course. The school called me to tell us you were coming." They stand in the entry, cluttered with hundreds of mismatched shoes and wellies. It's late, but the lights are still one, the children awake. There's a lot of children, ranging from toddlers in diapers to teenagers who's lives have already turned them into adults. Out of the corner of his eye Saw can seem them in the central room, arguing, rough housing, playing, fighting. It's a kind of chaos that reminds Saw of the Shatterdome after an attack, not of any kind of civilian situation. 

"I don't think you really want Jyn." The lady turns toward him, tiredness etched into every line of her face. "Take John or Maisy instead. Their good kids- hard workers, if you know what I mean. Won't let you down." 

He fixes her with a cold stare. "I came for Jyn Erso. Jyn Erso scored 171 on the strategical aptitudes." 

She rolled her eyes. "You may have some fancy way of doing things, but I'm telling you, that girl's a fucking handful. She may be clever as the devil, but she isn't well behaved." 

"I'm sure the kaiju care whether the weapons we send to kill them are well behaved or not." 

"Suit yourselves. That girl's had the devil in her since the day she was dropped on our doorstep." She starts to lead Saw through the house, but she stopes him on the grand staircase. "There's something else you need to know about Erso." 

She drops her voice, lowers her head conspiratorially. "Maggie and I didn't write this up, didn't want central getting all involved and whatnot. But there was . . . an incident a few weeks ago." 

"An incident . . . concerning Erso, I presume?" 

She nods. "We had a charge here. Boy named Gavin. He used to be a bit of a bully, a tease to the little girls. Used to take their sweets, pull their braids and what not. Sometimes he'd even beat up the ones who got mouthy." 

"And you just . . . left it?" 

"I always just figured, survival of the fittest. So a few weeks ago, Gavin takes Erso's pencil case on the way to school. She tries to fight back, ends up with a black eye and a few scratches. I think we all figured that'd be the end of all of it. Happens to everyone here, some point or another." 

"So this is not the end of it? For the child?" 

"She decides to confront him behind the kitchen, after school. He brings his friends, think's he gonna make a big show of it. Little bitch had a knife she'd knicked on kitchen duty. She just fucking runs at him, kicking and screaming, knocks him back into the dumpster. His fucking head just rams into the metal corner, knocks him out." 

"Survival of the fittest." 

"Not the end of it, either. She walks back, and she keeps on kicking him, punching him. He's out cold and the little bitch keeps on fucking punching him. I figured it was all gonna right itself, but I had to pull her off of him with bloody fists. None of his friends were gonna cross her again after that." 

"Can I speak to this boy? Gavin?" 

"See, here's the thing we didn't want to mess around with paperwork about. Gavin woke up, to be sure, but he's no longer quite . . . right in the head. We had to transfer him to a different center." 

Saw takes a moment to register this information. "Show me Jyn Erso." 

"You still want her? Fucking psychopath for your program." 

"A fucking psychopath might be exactly what we need" Saw tells her as he walks past her on the staircase. 

Jyn Erso sits cross-legged and erect on her lower bunk. She's towards the end of a massive dormitory, but there's a kind of calm serenity to her that stands out among the squabbling children in various states of readiness for bed. She's an island in a sea of chaos, staring straight ahead. 

"You've come to take me to prison, haven't you?" She asks Saw as soon as he arrives at her bunk. Saw sees she's fiddling with something in her hands- a home made figurine of some kind, cobbled together from scraps of metal. A child's idea of a Jaeger. 

"No, child. Child, your school told me that you were clever enough to be a Jaeger pilot." He pries the toy from her hands. "This could be you someday." 

Her eyes light up. "Really?" 

"You just have to answer some questions. You understand?"

She nodds, shifting on her bed in preparation. As she does so, Saw notices shiny flashes of plastic and trinkets left on her covers. She's the only one of the small girls whose managed to keep her pillow and her comforter from the domineering older children, but from the looks of it Jyn's managed to collect a variety of likely verboten substances from the outside world. Nail polish, Cadbury's, bracelets, a shiny plastic package of hair ties, a toy car. So she's a thief and a magpie. Bold move, to have them out in the open, but it seems Jyn is enjoying the protection and privilege she earned from her fight with Gavin. 

Saw wonders if she knows what happened to him. 

Finding some of the stuff she's collected isn't exactly easy these days, with the nationwide rationing. It'd take some ingenuity to get ahold of Cadbury's bars or sparkly pink nail polish. Saw wonders if that could be applied to jaegers, to winning battles with nothing. 

"Your fight with the boy, Gavin. Why'd you do it?." 

She looks up him, tiny. Are eight year old girls always so small? "If he was just hurting me, I'd find a way to get even later. Steal his lunch money or his biscuits. But he was being making fun of Sara's teeth, stealing Deepa's toys. He'd make the small ones hand over their sweets whenever he wanted some, and he'd punch whoever wouldn't do it. Sometimes he'd beat up the boys in the toilets." 

A protector's instinct. That could come in useful, down the line. 

"So you fought him to protect the others. But when it came down to it, no one protected you." 

Jyn shifts her gaze back to staring straight ahead. "Yes. I think they're scared of me, now." 

"So then, why did you do it, if no one protected you?" 

"Because no one protected me." 

"Good, good, child. Now I have one final question. After you saw Gavin fall, why did you keep fighting him?"

"His friends were there. If I hadn't done that, he'd have just gotten right back up and gone back to punching the rest of us. I kept fighting him because I wanted it to be over. Because I never wanted to fight him again." 

Saw walks over, sits down on the opposite bunk and leans forward so he's almost eye level with the girl. "Very good, child, very good. You will be an excellent pilot, I think." He handed the jaeger back to her. "Welcome to the Jaeger program. Pack up your things quickly. We've a long, long journey to make.

-oOo- 

Twenty Years Ago 

Ahsoka Tahno walks through the refugee center, feeling consciously out of place. The people here are the survivors of the attack on Tijuana and the aid workers trying desperately to deal with the wreckage the kaiju have caused. There is so little Ahsoka can do to help but fight, but surrounded by the lost and the dying she feels powerless. 

"Like a band-aid on cancer," Saw Gerrera would say, and although Ahsoka has never agreed with Saw, has sworn never to turn human lives into numbers in an equation in the way he has, it's in scenes like this that she understands his code, how Saw Gerrera came to be. 

She wanders through the rows of cots, the makeshift hospital, the endless lines for water, food, even the bathroom. It's a scene from a war, the inevitable "what happens after." After the battle has ended, the casualties have been numbered, and the soldiers have packed and moved on. To the next battle and the next loss. 

The soldiers like Ahsoka. 

She finds the boy on the third floor, leaning against the cold metal walls. He's tiny- the file said six, but somehow he seems even younger. But there's a kind of dull terror in his eyes that seems to belong to someone who's seen more than any six year old ever should. 

She sets down a plate and a water bottle in front of him. Almost robotically, he slides it back towards her. 

"You can't stop eating." 

Her blue and white striped hijab and her jaeger pilot's uniform may mark Ahsoka as obviously foreign, but her Spanish is perfect, and it seems to take the boy slightly by surprise. 

He still stays silent and unmoving. 

"The nurse says you haven't moved and haven't eaten in days."

Still no response. People are always the hardest part of war, Ahsoka thinks. She's known how to pilot a jaeger since she was fourteen, but finding ways to rally her troops, give them some kind of hope in the face of all this destruction? That's what keeps her awake at night. 

After she pulled him from the rubble, she watched as he wandered- dazed, confused, covered in pulverized cement that made him look like a grayish ghost- over to the evacuation authorities. Another casualty of war. Another example of collateral damage. Another heartbreaking image for the morning news, to be forgotten when public interest wears out. 

"Your parents would want you to eat." 

"My parents wouldn't want anything. My parents are dead." She's surprised to hear him speak or even acknowledge the world around him. 

"So are mine. But I still know that if they were alive, they'd want me to eat." 

"Doesn't matter now." 

Ahsoka leans against the wall next to him. This is going to take awhile, but she's gotten 30 hours clearance from the Panama City shatter dome. She watches the line for the water fountain and the hordes of people walking in and out of the elevator. She watches bodies, swathed in red-stained sheets, being carried down by crying families. 

"Are you ever going to leave?" 

"Not until you eat something." Ahsoka thinks about the number rules regarding PTSD and psychology and children and probably just basic human decency she's breaking. But she isn't going to leave the boy adrift. 

"So if I eat something, you'll go away? 

"Right on the money, sky guy." 

He picks up the plate and the fork. It isn't much- a meager quantity of rice and beans, a hunk of whatever protein substitute they're trying to pass off as chicken these days. She watches as he takes a bite of beans dejectedly. 

"There. Now you can go away." 

"I said I'd go away if you ate. That was hardly a bite." 

"You said you'd go away if I ate something. There. That was something." 

Ahsoka sighs. "I came to make sure you were OK, and I'm not leaving till I'm sure of it. You understand?" The moment she says it, Ahsoka chides herself. Of course he's not going to be alright. No one would be, and certainly not a six-year-old.

"I'm not gonna be OK. Everyone keeps telling me everything's alright. But it's not." He's almost crying now, and without really thinking, Ahsoka wraps and arm around him. He doesn't recoil or flinch. 

"You're right, Cassian. Everything isn't alright." 

He starts crying in earnest now, and Ahsoka feels his tears dripping into the technical fabric of her uniform. 

"Why- why did you come back for me?" he chokes out. 

"You recognise me?" 

"The scarf. It was sticking out of your helmet." Ahsoka almost laughs. Jaeger pilots aren't supposed to take personal artifacts with them into combat, but Ahsoka's worn her favorite hijab- now faded and tearing at the seams- into every combat mission since she was fifteen. 

"You're a smart boy, Cassian. How would you like to become a Jaeger pilot?" 


	2. Sequestration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You thought that I wouldn't find a way to be petty about Trump in a Pacific Rim fan fiction?  
> You thought Wrong. I honestly never intended to stick in Social Commentary, but it felt even stranger to avoid it in the scenes where Cassian's talking about The Wall and Jyn's getting interrogated in a police station. 
> 
> Anyway, still in the set up section but Plot Things are beginning to happen. FYI, Galen, Lyra, and Krennic are all kind of AWOL in this AU- I love them as characters, but I wanted to focus on Saw and Jyn's relationship. A girl can only have so many father figures in a fic!
> 
> And I blatantly stuck in Ahsoka. So there.
> 
> And neither Cassian nor the reader are actually done with the Tijuana incident. I think you could probably guess that.

Panama City Shatterdome, 2041

"Ahsoka Tano was the bravest of us and the best of us." 

Cassian looks over the masses of people gathered for her funeral. Her funeral prayers where weeks ago, attended by Ahsoka's close friends and colleages and most of the local Muslim community at the Shatterdome mosque, but Mothma and Draven insisted on something more public. More military. Something where people could put on dress uniforms and thank her for her service. 

"Ahsoka wouldn't have wanted this," he told them, but it didn't matter. He'd long found that funerals weren't for the dead, but for the living. And Ahsoka Tano was a symbol, a legend, a martyr.

Now Cassian looks out over the crowd, hundreds of people she probably barely knew in her life. Even from the stage, he can see the glitter of dress uniforms, the flash of news cameras. There's no body left to honor, so instead there are massive canvas posters of her, steely eyed and resolved, on either side of the stage. In one she's barely more than a teenager, young but angry. One of the first Jaeger pilots. In the other she's older, the lines of middle age digging deeper into her features. She looks even angrier. 

"Ahsoka was a woman of strength, and of faith. Her faith gave her strength to become stronger than anyone. There was a phrase she liked to say, a line from the Qu'ran. "And whoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved all mankind." But Ahsoka didn't just save a life. She saved millions. Ahsoka Tano was the lynchpin of the Panama City shatter dome, patrolling the coast from Nayarit to Colombia." 

Polite applause. It was quite forcibly suggested that Cassian give the speech in English, so he typed it and practiced it in front of a mirror until he had memorized it by rote and his voice didn't hitch on any of the vowels or H's. In hindsight, it was probably a good idea. He thinks he probably won't cry on this read through of it. 

"But in war we have a tendency to think of lives as something nebulous, long words in a meeting or numbers in a ledger. So I'll tell you this. Ahsoka Tano saved my life. I was six years old when Hundun made landfall in San Diego. They told us we'd be safe in Tijuana, that Trump's wall would stop the thing before it ever got past San Diego." 

A hush in the room, a kind of nervous tension. Even from the stage, Cassian can see the front rows starting to fidget. Draven's going to have his hide as soon as this is done and the press blows up over this, but not everything is for Draven. This is to honor Ahsoka's memory. 

"That wall didn't even keep out people. The monster made a mockery of it, tore through it like it was made of cardboard." 

Cassian remembers watching it from the roof of his family's apartment complex. It was so far away, so hazy, that it felt like watching something happening on TV. He hadn't been properly scared until he'd seen the masses of people trying escape. 

"My family died that day. My entire family, gone. My mother, my father, my sisters Rosa and Luisa, my abuela. All killed. But I lived." 

He doesn't give any more details. Even now, the memories cut like a knife. But they are his, not meant for propaganda or public opinion. He's given everything to this war. At least he can have his own past. 

"Afterwards, Ahsoka was the one who pulled me from the rubble. She came and found me, later, in the refugee center. I don't know what it was about me that made such an impression, but she came back for me." 

Damn it. He is going to cry this time. 

"I had thought all of my family was dead. Ahsoka became my family. She took me on as her apprentice in the Jaeger program, taught me the ropes at the Panama City Shatterdome. But she was the closest thing I had to a mother and a guide. Ahsoka was the one who helped me face what had happened and keep walking. There where many things in her life she had to keep walking from as well. When I was fifteen, I joined her in piloting Fulcrum." 

Real applause this time.

"In the end, it was the war that killed her. The first-generation jaeger didn't have proper radiation shielding. Gave her cancer, thirty years down the line. They say she fought it like a warrior losing a battle. She died at fifty four years years old." 

He steels himself inside. He will not cry. "Ahsoka Tano was the greatest Jaeger pilot to ever live. Know this. But she was also one of the greatest people to ever live as well. She saw her faith in a world where most of us have just given up. She saw a broken six-year-old refugee and made him her apprentice and her family. She gave everything to protecting our world, and everything in it."

Silence. The low hum of chatter has died, the audience focused on him in a way that makes him want to bolt from the stage. But he doesn't. 

"Rest in peace. And rest in power." 

He receives a standing ovation as he walks back towards his seat. 

-0- 

Cassian sees Kay in the front row, wearing something that looks almost like a suit, and for the first time in weeks, Cassian almost laughs. It must have been a monumental effort to force them to get rid of the black goth crap that they seem to wear these days, and he pities whoever's job it was. 

"That speech was excellently written and likely to draw emotional support. I assume that is what Mothma meant. The jaeger program requires more funds, as of late." Kay doesn't exactly whisper, and has already drawn the ire of those sitting nearby. 

"Thanks, Kay," he mumbles as he sits down next to them. There's a few more speeches, several from rising political stars looking to rub shoulders with the right people, others from industrialists who give poorly disguised sales pitches to the Jaeger program. Cassian feels like fighting all of them. Or sleeping for days. He isn't sure which. 

There's cake after the ceremony, and something alcoholic. He downs a few glasses of whatever it is, hoping to get at least a little drunk before the hand-shaking begins. It occurs to him that it might be a good idea to keep a close eye on Kay. Cassian usually finds Kay's filter-less truth refreshing, but he doesn't think the four-star generals assembled would as well. Besides, are they even old enough to drink? 

"Mr. Andor?" 

There's a voice behind him, timid and British. He turns around to see an ethnically ambiguous man about his age and probably only a little smaller but dressed in an ill-fitting suit. A scientist, probably. There's a nervous quality about him, as though he doesn't want to be noticed, or waste anyone's time without just cause. 

"I'm Bodhi Rook. I study Kaiju at Lima Shatterdome." 

"A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Rook. I'm Cassian Andor." He shakes Rook's hand, trying to use one of his winning smiles.

"My deepest condolences. I didn't know Ahsoka very well, but she made quite an impression, Inshallah." There's a nervous energy about Rook. Cassian wonders if it's a result of social anxieties or from having a job that requires monitoring the end of the world. 

"You knew Ahsoka?"

"Not for very long, no. But she told me-" Rook cuts himself off, as though he doesn't know what to say next. "Do you mind if we talk later, somewhere more private?" 

"Of course." Cassian isn't sure what this is about, but if Ahsoka- 

"Mister Andor. I see you've met Mr. Rook." The trilling English accent of Mon Mothma glides toward them, accompanied by her persistent shadow. General Davits Draven, one of Cassian's least favorite people. 

He downs the rest of his drink, just in case. 

"I assume Mr. Rook was informing you of his work at Lima Shatterdome?" 

"I-" She cuts Rook off, makes a small hand signal that he should leave. Cassian's sad to watch him retreat back into the crowd. 

"The UN has officially closed down the Panama City Shatterdome." She says it like it's some kind of new information, shared with a close confidante. Not an objective reality they can all see in the chunks of metal already missing from the ceiling or the packing crates behind the stage.

"I know that, Director Mothma. This ceremony was the last hurrah." 

"We'd like you to return to the Jaeger program at Lima Shatterdome. It is now the only functional protector of the Western Pacific Rim." 

Cassian almost chokes on his drink. "What? I haven't been in a jaeger in years." 

"At great cost to the world, Mr. Andor." Now there's a strong jolt of anger in her practiced pleasant demeanor. 

"It wasn't my decision. After Ahsoka, no one is . . . drift compatible with me. No one. I didn't want to be a waste of resources, so I left."

"And I've been told you do excellent work with refugees, or whatever it is you do. But we need you at the Shatterdome." 

"Why me? What about Organa?" 

"The exact quote we have from Organa is "The buggers will have to take Manilla out of my cold, dead hands." We presumed she intended to stay at the Asia Central shatter dome." Draven speaks for the first time, Mothma's calculating ginger shadow. 

Of course. Organa would defend Alderaan Sector until her dying breath. But there was a kind of flexibility for her within the system that came with practically being royalty, the daughter of the Manilla and San Juan directors. Cassian's only claim was Ahsoka.

"If it's drift compatibility you're worried about, there are hundreds of trained recruits. Even you can find someone. It's a machine, for heaven's sake, not a marital contract." 

"Tell that to Malbus and Imwe." The world's most successful Jaeger pilots, and Cassian suspected they'd been married for years. 

"Malbus and Imwe have been officially moved to Lima. And Dameron and Bey. But we need a third Jaeger in the event of attack."

He isn't going to get out of this and he knows it. 

"I'll go with you to Lima. If we can't find anyone drift compatible, I go back to my work in the Pacific. A deal?" 

She shakes his hand. "A deal, Mr. Andor. I formally welcome you back to the Jaeger program." 

He smiles again, shakes her hand. It's going to be a dangerous waste of time, he knows. The Drift works with shared experiences, and there's no one left alive in the world whose going to have even remotely shared experiences with him.

\- oOo-

Los Angeles, 2041

"State your name for the record." 

"Liana Halifax." 

The interrogation room is dark and dingy, the floor littered with pencil stubs and crumpled wrappers. It's taking Jyn longer than it should to adjust to the once familiar weight of handcuffs. She's been in rooms and situations exactly like this one a half dozen times, but it hasn't happened for years. 

"Don't kid yourself, Jyn Erso. We know we've got our hands on one of LA's most prolific car thieves." It's another one of those smarmy white boy beat cops that Jyn hates with a kind of burning anger. He's already made a show out of individually pulling the pins out of her hair, his fingers touching the back of her neck for far longer than they should. But if anything, she knows her privilege in dealing with men like him. It's part of the reason why she consistently volunteers for and pulls off the high-risk jobs. Because the risk is still infinitely lower for a 5'3 white gringa who knows how to bat her eyelashes at the right men. 

Batting her eyelashes isn't going to work this time. 

"How flattering." 

"Anyone can fall, Erso." 

She rolls her eyes. "Well then, let's get one with it. What is it I've stolen this time?" 

"You were caught red-handed attempting to hotwire a 2016 Kia Soul." 

"I was getting it for a friend." 

"You were getting it for a passport forger who sold you out the moment things got bad for him. Not so much honor among thieves, is there now?" 

Jyn's still kicking herself over that one. She should have waited, should have forged the documents herself. She knows how. It's just that the process takes time, and every report of Kaiju on the news makes her more anxious, more flighty. And Spider was offering passports, ID cards for the checkpoints, a ration book. The whole shebang, if she just pulled off a few jobs for him.

"Not so much honor among anyone these days." 

"What were you even trying to accomplish?" 

"The world's ending. I want to be somewhere fun when it does, too drunk off my arse to care." It shocks her when she says it, an admittance that everything she's been thinking these last few months is true. But it's only time before LA gets hit again, and if there's anywhere Jyn doesn't want to die, it's in this cursed city of angels. 

"Well, at best, we're looking at five to ten years jail time. So it seems LA can enjoy your company for a little while longer." That smarmy smile again. He doesn't seem to feel the intense, vaguely paranoid fear that's weighed Jyn down for years. It's gotten worse since they shut down the only Shatterdome 

"This entire city's going to be fucking obliterated by then. They shut down the only fucking Shatterdome on the west coast. So you really think a monster's going to see a wall and just stop?"

For a minute he doesn't say anything. Then he pulls out a sheaf of papers and spreads them on the table in front of her. 

"I've been required to inform you several changes in policy of the LA justice system. The first is that grand theft auto of Class A vehicles belonging to any individuals of segment B or higher has been federally reclassified as a capital offense." 

The full meaning of it hits Jyn like a ton of bricks. "What the fu-" 

"It is in response to the scarcity of functional vehicles for Segmant B individuals," the cop reads off of the paper. 

Segment B individuals. The upper levels of the military, the government, what remains of LA's intelligentsia. She knows that some of the more prominent businessmen have managed to buy their way on to that list as well. How the fuck was she supposed to know that Johnny Carlyle had gotten himself on it? 

"So they can kill me over a stolen car." 

"Technically, death can be considered in a legal framework as an appropriate punishment. You might get off with life. But it'll take years to get there." 

"More time in this city of joys. Almost makes me want the kaiju to attack now." She's only half sarcastic.

"I'd be careful about saying things that would be misconstrued as high treason. You do, however, have another option." 

Another shief of papers. When Jyn reads the headline at the top, she can hardly believe her own eyes. 

"Due to the dangerous nature of the work, all prisoners in Alliance countries can commute their sentences in the Shatterdome program," she reads. "So I get to die in a cell, or I get to be legally killed, or I get to die at a Shatterdome?" 

"Your choice, Erso." 

It isn't even really a consideration. She doesn't have a single chance of making a break for it in LA, but Lima? Maybe. "When do I leave for the Shatterdome?" 

**Author's Note:**

> Well this ended up having much stronger notes of Ender's Game than originally anticipated. I know I really failed at nailing Saw Gerrera's voice.


End file.
